Joe Rogan just revealed that presidents and former presidents personally pressured Spotify to have him removed for "vaccine misinformation."
And not one of them apologized when his questions turned out to be right.
He says he still can't talk about most of it. What he will say is that the campaign was coordinated, expensive, and came from the very top.
ROGAN: "They tried to crush my sponsors. They organized campaigns. There was PACs involved."
ROGAN: "I can't even talk about it. But there was presidents involved and former presidents involved that were contacting Spotify. Trying to get me removed for vaccine misinformation."
ROGAN: "And it turned out to be right. All of it."
ROGAN: "Not a single apology from anybody. Not a single retraction, not a single mea culpa, not a single 'we were wrong.'"
The pressure failed. Joe's audience grew. And the people who tried to silence him never had to answer for any of it...
Elon Musk: There are no lords and peasants at Tesla. Everyone eats at the same table.
“I actually know the people on the line, because I worked on the line, I walked the line, I slept in the factory, and I worked beside them. So, I'm no stranger to them.
There are many people at Tesla who have gone from working on the line to being in senior management. There are no lords and peasants. Everyone eats at the same table. Everyone parks in the same parking lot.
At GM, there's a special elevator only for senior executives. We have no such thing at Tesla.
We give everyone stock options. Many people who are just working the line, who didn't even know what stocks were, we've made them millionaires.
And I just want to say that I'm incredibly appreciative of those who build the cars, and they know it.”
New York Times DealBook Summit, 2023
You have noticed it. ChatGPT feels dumber than it used to. Your prompts that worked six months ago produce worse results now. The writing sounds flatter. The ideas sound safer. The internet itself feels like it is shrinking. Every article reads the same. Every email sounds the same. Every answer sounds like it was written by the same voice.
You thought it was you. It is not you.
Researchers at Oxford and Cambridge published a paper in Nature proving what is happening. They call it Model Collapse.
Here is the mechanism in one sentence. AI trained on AI-generated data gets dumber every generation until it forgets what real human data looked like.
The internet is filling with AI-generated content. Blog posts. Articles. Reviews. Comments. Social media. AI companies scrape the internet to train the next generation of models. Which means the next generation of AI is being trained on the output of the current generation.
Each cycle loses information. Not randomly. It loses the rarest, most unusual, most creative parts first. The researchers call these the "tails of the distribution." The weird ideas. The unexpected perspectives. The things that made the internet feel human. Those disappear first.
What remains is the average. The safe. The expected. The bland.
Then the next generation trains on that. And loses more. And the next generation trains on that. And loses more. The researchers proved this is not a slow decline. Major degradation happens within just a few iterations. Even when some of the original human data is preserved.
They tested it on large language models. On image generators. On statistical models. The pattern was the same every time. The output converges toward a narrow, flattened version of reality that looks nothing like the original data.
The lead researcher put it plainly. "Large language models are like fire. A useful tool. But one that pollutes the environment."
The pollution is invisible. You cannot see which sentence on the internet was written by a human and which was written by AI. Neither can the AI that is about to train on it. And once the tails are gone, they do not come back. The damage is irreversible.
This is not a prediction anymore. It is a diagnosis.
The internet you grew up on was built by humans writing things no algorithm would have written. Strange, personal, imperfect, alive. That internet is being diluted. One generation of AI at a time. And the models trained on what remains are learning a smaller and smaller version of the world.
Model Collapse is not a technical problem. It is a cultural one. The thing that made the internet worth reading is the thing that disappears first.
i got 3 clankers running frontier models monitoring the situation
500+ global sources analyzed every five minutes
no ads, no paywalls, no clickbait
made it for myself, yall are welcome to use it for free
https://t.co/PFGsLTaDne
I'm finally reading Dune. This quote, which is in the first few pages, hits hard:
"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."
i should not have left x
created a vacuum for grifters
i was wrong, that’s on me
elon wanted $50k for my deleted account so i made a fresh handle and kept the bitcoin
🚨 We may be looking at the rarest market setup in 50 years.
The S&P 500's four historic drawdowns since 1972:
– 1973 Inflation: -43%
– 1987 Liquidity: -30%
– 2000 Tech: -47%
– 2008 Credit: -55%
Each one was driven by ONE dominant risk.
Right now, all four are present at the same time.
1. INFLATION
A commodity supercycle. Energy, metals, agriculture all in multi-year base breakouts. The Fed's preferred inflation gauge has been above 2% for 18 of the last 24 months.
2. LIQUIDITY
The largest equity supply shock since 2000. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic raising ~$275B combined. Google flipping from $60B/year buybacks to $80B net issuance. Over $1 trillion of IPO and lockup supply hitting the Russell 3000 in 2026.
3. TECH
Semiconductors trading 73% above their 200-day moving average – the largest stretch since March 2000. Climax run signals across the AI complex. Micron, Palantir, SMCI, the SOX index, all showing the textbook O'Neil sell pattern.
4. CREDIT
Apollo, KKR, BlackRock, Blue Owl, Cliffwater, Partners Group – all gating redemptions on their evergreen funds in the last 90 days. The private credit machine is freezing in real time.
Never in 50 years have all four risks been simultaneously present.
But here's the part nobody talks about
While the AI Big 10 has gone vertical, quality stocks have been left for dead.
– Berkshire Hathaway: trailing the S&P 500 by hundreds of basis points
– Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi: trading at multi-year relative lows
– HEICO, Union Pacific, MSCI: making boring new highs while everyone watches Nvidia
– Healthcare vs. S&P 500: 25-year relative low
The last time this happened?
December 1999. Barron's ran a cover titled "What's Wrong, Warren?" – mocking Buffett for being a dinosaur, for missing the internet, for refusing to pay for growth at any price.
Berkshire was down 19% in 1999 while the Nasdaq was up 85%.
What followed:
– Berkshire +29% over the next 24 months
– Nasdaq -78% over the next 30 months
The setup today
Four historic risks stacked simultaneously, while the boring, durable, cash-flowing businesses that always survive these regimes have been treated like dead money for years.
The math doesn't get more asymmetric than this.
Quality stocks aren't out of style.
They're being orphaned.
That's when generational positions are built.
The boring stuff hasn't worked for a long time.
History suggests that's exactly the moment it starts to.
The world is hitting tank‑bottom oil inventories by September.
Oil inventories work like blood in the human body: you can donate a bit, but below a certain level your blood pressure tanks and organs start failing. You don’t die because blood hits zero, you die because circulation collapses
That’s where we are with oil. We began the year with more than 8 billion barrels in storage, yet only around 10% was actually usable without pushing the system into stress... that safety margin has now been drawn down.
The next stage is dropping to operational floor levels, where pipelines and refineries start failing – that’s the real tank bottom.
Anthropic is questioning whether AI may turn out to be altogether useless. This is the single most honest thing Anthropic has ever written.
“But achieving recursive improvement alone does not suggest an immediate change in how industrial production occurs, societies organize, or markets function. More intelligence can’t learn what a drug does over decades of use, can’t hold elections sooner than a constitution dictates, and can’t turn a stranger into an old friend in a weekend. For most people, the felt pace of this future will still be set by the bottlenecks, even if the laboratory upstream runs at the speed of compute. That collision, where recursive intelligence building itself ever faster meets the world of humans, relationships, and governance, is another part of this future we can’t predict.”
Equity markets at all time highs with the highest degree of concentration in a few stocks ever
Bitcoin is down 50% from all time highs and precisely zero of it's fundamentals have changed
It's so obvious
If you don't take this trade you are not a contrarian
You're the heard